Heavy marijuana use can boost blood levels of a particular protein, perhaps raising a person’s risk of a heart attack or stroke, US government researchers said.
Dr Jean Lud Cadet of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, said the findings point to another example of long-term harm from marijuana. [...]

Thousands of teens reveal their perceptions, experience in scientific survey
Perception does not equal reality with teen drivers according to a study released today by The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and State Farm Insurance(R) in the journal Pediatrics. Using the National Young Driver Survey, researchers studied more than 5,000 9th through 11th graders from across [...]

Researchers found that among 341 3-year-olds, those whose mothers ate more than two servings of fish per week during pregnancy generally performed better on tests of verbal, visual and motor development.
On the other hand, tests scores were lower among preschoolers whose mothers had relatively high mercury levels in their blood during pregnancy.
And mothers who regularly [...]

Biologists have long puzzled over the relationship between evolution of complex traits and the randomness of mutations in genes. Some have proposed that a %26quot;cost of complexity%26quot; makes it more difficult to evolve a complicated trait by random mutations, because effects of beneficial mutations are diluted.
%26quot;While a mutation in a single gene can have effects [...]

Children who are five to six months old are growing rapidly and need sufficient iron to fuel their development. However, this is also the time when an infant’s first iron reserves start becoming depleted.
Physiologist Raymond Glahn at the ARS Plant, Soil and Nutrition [...]

Cancer afflicts 1.5 million people a year in the United States alone, and lung cancer is the most common and deadly form of cancer worldwide. This study indicates a direct role for a miRNA in cancer progression and introduces a new paradigm of using miRNAs as effective therapeutic agents to treat human cancer.
%26quot;We believe this [...]

%26quot;The interesting thing about this mutant is that while it triggers totally normal RNA replication, it causes severe defects in the output of infectious virus–in fact, it releases no infectious virus that we can detect,%26quot; says Tellinghuisen. %26quot;And though this discovery isn’t a cure for HCV, it is an important research tool that stops the [...]

The findings may help explain why species can almost never interbreed, and also point to a possible way to thwart the spread of malaria, a disease that kills about 1 million people each year, primarily children in sub-Saharan Africa.
In a new study researchers from UT Southwestern have found that sexual reproduction begins with a two [...]

For the first time, scientists have shown that it is more difficult for women to replace muscle that is lost naturally as they get older — because of key differences in the way their bodies react to food.
Experts at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, USA and The University of Nottingham, UK [...]

However, some patients later developed leukemia. This slowed progress in the field and has led to detailed studies seeking to determine the mechanisms underlying the cause of leukemia and whether other genes that are candidates for gene therapy approaches might pose a similar risk.
A new study, carried out by Hans-Peter Kiem and colleagues, at the [...]